There is a phrase called ‘Jumping the shark’. It comes from the classic sitcom Happy Days. It was years into their run and they were losing their audience share so they thought if they did something spectacular they would get more attention. They decided to do a stunt, Fonzie literally jumped over a shark on his motorbike. It was the end of Happy Days and now it is a term for when some form of entertainment tries to do something to generate interest but it’s just a death rattle.
F9: The Fast Saga, or Fast and Furious 9 (dir. Justin Lin), depending on where you are reading it, is the 9th (shocking, I know) instalment in the Fast and Furious universe. The film centers around a group of ragtag heroes lead by Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) who must use all of their smarts and cars to stop a world domination level threat. This time the threat is Dom’s long lost and never mentioned before Brother, Jakob (John Cena).
A quick recap, the Fast and Furious franchise started in the halcyon days of 2001 with The Fast and the Furious. It was a remake of Point Break but instead of surfing the cop infiltrates street racing culture. In the first film, they had to steal DVD players. There were some interesting action scenes with real driving and real stakes. Now, they are flying cars into orbit, yes, orbit, does it feel like they are jumping a shark, yes, kinda.
The films lost their appeal until the 4th film in the series, Fast and Furious, also directed by Lin where they dialled the action up to 11 and started to ignore physics entirely. And it was fun, dumb and rocks, but fun. There was a huge emphasis on family, it was overly sweet but it had some heart.
This has been the progression ever since, bigger and bigger missions. Bigger and bigger stunts. Family always comes first, with bigger and bigger stars, and by bigger, I mean physically. Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson joined and there were issues between him and Diesel on who the toughest guy was, that is why now there is Cena, another enormous block of man.
And here we are on the 9th film and you can only do so much before the audience starts rolling its eyes with the impossibility of what is happening given the history of the film. So they started to lean into it. The characters are trying to be meta, addressing the ridiculousness of never getting hurt when people are shooting at them, given the situations they have been in and saving the planet on multiple occasions.
There is a back story thrown in about Dom and Jakob’s young life to try to add some context around their animosity in the story. It feels completely out of place with the rest of the movie. In their desire to create depth they just made the film feel more shallow and empty. Diesel is a great actor and has put in some good performances but this was not one of them. It was like the flashbacks were from a different movie.
Which gets us to sending a car into orbit. For a movie that started with normal people who could get hurt to people catching other people from falling to their deaths by having them land on the hood of a moving car, it just feels ridiculous. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do put a literal shark jump in the next film. Yes, there are two more coming. They have unfortunately replaced what was spectacular for spectacle and it is a poorer film for it.
20 June 2021
By Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe